February 26, 2013

Sherlock Holmes is moving along; we're about to start on Charles Marowitz's Sherlock's Last Case, which is aimed at audiences who have always wondered why Watson didn't just slug Holmes across the jaw and toss him in the Thames. (Alas, the ending is less satisfying from that POV than the end of Act I.) Meanwhile, we watched the Rathbone/Bruce Hound last week, and everyone was pretty appalled by Bruce's Watson--which is hardly an unusual reaction. Still, the angst was useful for moving the students in a different direction: making your instinctive gut responses ("This Watson is an utter fool! Why does Holmes even put up with him?!") into prompts for further reflection ("OK, but what does the film get out of making Watson an utter fool?"). Once the question about Foolish!Watson's narrative function was on the table, the students quickly moved beyond GRAR and into more complex issues, especially the way in which the film sets up Holmes as a national superhero--the ending pretty much says this explicitly--and uses his relationship with Watson to emphasize his status as protector of the "innocent." (In this context, the film's cheeriness about Holmes' drug use is quite fascinating.) Because, as the class concluded, Bruce's Watson isn't simply a fool; in many ways, he's a child, in need of paternal oversight.

February 23, 2013

The success of Lincoln and Argo, along with the tense debates over Zero Dark Thirty, has been responsible for reviving a centuries-old question: what is the proper status of the historical in historical fiction (or, in this case, film)? Strictly speaking, this is really a subset of a far older question about the right relationship between any fictional representation and reality, which we could pursue all the way to Plato and Aristotle. And that question, in turn, brings up an equally old problem: what does fiction do to its readers/viewers? In the early modern and modern era, for example, we have Don Quixote and its descendants (e.g., Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote); the anti-Gothics of Jane Austen, E. S. Barrett, and William Beckford; Flaubert's Madame Bovary; and the like, all criticizing the deadly combination of fictional excess (or inaccuracy) and readerly gullibility. Of course, modern readers may scoff at the assumption that some people really believed that romance narratives were somehow "real," and yet we have our own equivalents--the notorious "CSI effect" (which may or may not be true) being an example. From the flip side, arguments in favor of fiction suggested that narrative could provide the innocent reader with guides to courtship (How and How Not to Do It), make us better people (by learning to identify with characters and, thus, other humans), or even clarify the existence of God (divine providence being "clearer" in fiction). Everyone agrees that we learn something from fiction. But what?

These questions are understandably more pressing when it comes to historical fictions, where cultural memory (and, not infrequently, national politics) are at stake. Maureen Dowd tells us that her "pet peeve" is "filmmakers who make up facts in stories about real people to add 'drama,' rather than just writing the real facts better." But she doesn't really wrestle with writer Tony Kushner's argument about Lincoln: "He said that in historical movies, as opposed to history books where you
go for 'a blow-by-blow account,' it is completely acceptable to 'manipulate a small detail in the service of a greater historical truth.
History doesn’t always organize itself according to the rules of drama.'" There's a conflict here, that is, between the demands of genre conventions and narrative form, on the one hand, and facts, on the other. Kushner describes standard operating procedure for historical novelists from Walter Scott onward: to the extent that an imaginative work can make truth-claims about history, it does so through the overarching narrative, reserving the right to move things around/rewrite inconvenient details/consolidate characters/whatever in order to make the narrative function successfully within its generic constraints. Emphasizing narrative gets you Waverley; emphasizing facts gets you, well, Queenhoo-Hall. (And yes, I've read Queenhoo-Hall. I nearly fell asleep over it--and given what I normally read for my research, that tells you something.) We expect history to aspire to objectivity, even if its reach exceeds its grasp; historical fiction tends to be more pronouncedly presentist. (Is Lincoln about the Civil War era, or is it about twenty-first century politics? Or both?) But then, as critics have long pointed out, what does it mean to determine that this or that fact can be twisted or tweaked? I can recall the historian Kali Israel being deeply annoyed about what happens to Sir Charles Dilke in Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown (blink and you'll miss him--he's the guy screaming about how we should get rid of the monarchy), for reasons very similar to Dowd's. Here's the thing: we cannot separate this new "fact" about Dilke from the film's narrative arguments concerning the role and nature of modern monarchy. And so we're back to that tension between narrative and fact again. There's a reason why these questions remain forever unresolved...

ETA: As I continued to think about this topic overnight, I was suddenly struck by Dowd's choice of facts. In the very same newspaper, Kate Masur had noted the distorted representation of William Slade and Elizabeth Keckley, who were political activists, not simply White House servants. And yet, this depature from facticity doesn't make it into Dowd's article. In other words, objections raised at the level of fact have their own political valences; they're not simply cries of "objectivity!" and "reality!" raised against narrative distortions.

William Palmer, Two of Eight Letters to N. Wiseman, D.D., on the Errors of Romanism (King & Baird, 1851). US reprint of part of Palmer's controversial tracts on the usual Catholic targets (here, with heavy emphasis on idolatry). Palmer, of Worcester College, Oxford, was a lapsed Tractarian; somewhat confusingly, his contemporary is William Palmer of Magdalene College, Oxford, also a Tractarian (and, late in life, a convert to Catholicism). (eBay)

February 20, 2013

If you are seriously going to go about drumming up reviews of your book, please do not begin your e-mail in this fashion:

"Dear Literary Blogger,

A friend gave me a list of the email addresses of literary bloggers.
I'm not even sure I know what a literary blogger is, but I guess some of
you must write reviews and maybe even a few of you write reviews of
poetry books."

1) Believe it or not, I have a name. You can even find it by poking about on my blog. In the future, choose from a) leaving off the salutation, b) opting for something more formal, or c) personalizing the e-mail.

2) No doubt that "I'm not even sure" bit was meant to be funny. Indeed, I laughed for approximately .03 seconds. But, you know, you're asking me to do you a favor, and...you think the best way of selling yourself is to be vaguely condescending in oh-so-humorous fashion? Are you quite serious?

3) Did you actually look at the blogs in question to see if they're relevant?

4) Did you look at my blog to see if I review contemporary poetry? A hint: the answer is no!

February 17, 2013

1. On Saturday, I gird my loins (how do you do that, anyway?) for a trip from Rochester, NY to College Station, TX. More precisely, a trip from Rochester, NY-->NYC, NY-->Houston, TX-->College Station, TX.

2. The airport is not snowed in.

3. Our boarding is only slightly delayed.

4. And then, we are informed that our plane is kaput. Of course, we can wait around for the next plane to LaGuardia, which will arrive in about 3 hours; alas, that does nothing for me and most of my fellow passengers, as we have all seen our connections go kaflooey.

5. We wait in lines.

6. Apparently, college students have booked everything for their February breaks, or something. Why do all these college students have February breaks?

7. We continue waiting in lines. The poor gate attendants have the unpleasant duty of informing passenger after passenger that there are, in fact, no seats on any planes to anywhere.

8. One young woman berates an increasingly tense attendant, despite being told repeatedly that there are, you know, no seats. The young woman makes a decision, then changes her mind after the attendant punches in all the necessary information. The attendant is displeased. Meanwhile, one guy decides to use non-family-friendly language, which displeases the attendant even further (there are young kids nearby).

9. I am ushered over to another line, where I am told that "young lady, you're not going to College Station tonight." I knew that. I did not, however, know that I was a young lady--forty-one is no longer especially youthful--but I decide to go with the flow.

February 16, 2013

I am currently teaching James Malcolm Rymer's (er, maybe) Varney, the Vampyre. And, of course, I am teaching Sherlock Holmes. Rymer's prose style sets new records for word inflation. Although his paragraphs are usually quite short, his characters engage in meaningless dialogue, repeat themselves (and other people) endlessly, and inject vapidities everywhere, all in the name of getting each installment to the right length. Conan Doyle, by contrast, is most economical with his language. The Rymer/Conan Doyle combination on my teaching schedule has led me to contemplate a proposition that may or may not be brought on by delirium: how would Rymer have written The Hound of the Baskervilles? I offer a sample below.

***

My dear--very dear--quite precious, in fact--friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes--he of whose exploits I have written in many a narrative, which you may purchase at the nearest bookstall to peruse amidst the noise and bustle of your railway commute--my dear friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, as I was saying, who normally slept the sleep of the dead until all hours of the day, unless he he had burnt the midnight oil and thus remained awake until the glorious sun's rising heralded the dawn, was eating toast and jam. I, who lacked toast and jam and, in any event, preferred marmalade, contemplated the cane that lay before me.

"It is a cane," said Holmes.

"A cane?"

"A cane."

"Indeed."

"Your thoughts?" Holmes inquired.

"About the lack of marmalade?"

"True, I had deduced that you were displeased about the marmalade by the peculiar shifting motions you were making with your feet. But I meant the cane."

"The cane?"

Holmes sighed. "The cane."

"I believe it has an owner."

"Excellent, Watson--excellent."

"Its owner is a doctor."

"True, true."

"A wealthy and highly-vaunted doctor."

"Amazing. A wealthy and highly-vaunted doctor?"

"A wealthy and highly-vaunted doctor."

"Watson!"

"Yes?"

"You are brilliant."

"Holmes!"

"Yes?"

"Finally, you agree!"

Holmes smirked. "Pray continue."

My self-love now considerably inflated, I continued. "He is fond of perambulation."

"As the engraving upon the cane attests, our doctor has been gifted this fine cane from the local hunt, which no doubt appreciated his skill in patching up the broken heads of its members."

Holmes arched one fine eyebrow, stretched out an immaculately-trousered leg, and tapped his right index finger against the table, thereby dangerously jostling the toast and jam. "Watson, you have out-scintillated yourself on this fine morning. I am impressed. Impressed, I say. Impressed!"

"I am glad to hear it, Holmes. Glad. Very glad."

"You are, of course, three-quarters in error, but I am impressed, all the same."

"I am glad--wait, three-quarters in error?"

"Three-quarters."

"Not two-thirds? Or perhaps one-half?"

"Neither two-thirds nor one-half."

I deflated. Manly tears sprang to my half-lidded eyes. I turned away, weeping, and attempted to console myself by smashing Holmes' pipe-rack to the ground. Holmes, no doubt distraught at the loss of his pipes--a calabash not among them, despite the wicked misrepresentations of that mountebank William Gillette--nevertheless sprang to my side with offers of coffee, fresh eggs, and toast and jam (but no marmalade).

"No, no, Watson--no--no! Forgive me--forgive! I meant not to cause you such stabs of pain."

I sobbed incoherently.

"Watson!" Holmes cried, nudging with one booted foot at the shattered remnants of his treasured smoking paraphernalia. "Watson!"

My skin paled. I swayed, then swooned to the ground, overwhelmed. My chest heaved--my eyes closed--my heart hammered. Dimly, I heard the rustling sounds of our good landlady's skirts, before I was revived by a wholesome splatter of marmalade across my face...

February 15, 2013

David Nirnberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (Norton, 2013). History of anti-Jewish thought from antiquity to the modern world. The title distinguishes Nirnberg's subject from what he classes as the strictly modern concept of antisemitism, which emerged in the 19th c.; he is studying "a category, a set of ideas and attributes with which non-Jews can make sense of and criticize their world" (3).

February 13, 2013

(Woo-hoo! Finally, some time to read a religious novel between bouts of proofing two different books.)

Not mine, but the double recantation of Mary, the benighted protagonist of Recantation; Or, the Confessions of a Convert to Romanism: A Tale, Written during a Residence in Tuscany and the Papal States (1845). This fictional conversion and deconversion novel, set against a rather cynical assessment of early Italian nationalism, mixes and matches a number of genres: the romance; the travel narrative; spiritual autobiography; the religious manual; and, as we discover at the end, the deathbed testament. Above all, it takes its journey through Italy as a pretext for warning against journeying to Rome.

As one reviewer pointed out, our protagonist and her mother both qualify as "nominal Protestants," and Mary's fall to the dark side Roman Catholicism derives, in very large part, from their mutual failures in the religious reading department. Failed mothering (and fathering) lies behind everyone who neglects religious truths, from Mary's mother (well-meaning and virtuous, but ultimately inadequate) to Mary's obnoxious mother-in-law, to Mary herself (who never becomes a mother). In particular, the novel chastizes English mothers who, like one especially unpleasant example, insist that their daughters market themselves to the most stupid of Italian romantic prospects: "You should always look pleased at whatever they say; when they laugh at any observation they have just made, mind and laugh too, even if you should not discover the wit of what they have been saying, and so by degrees you will get the character of a lively, intelligent girl" (31). By insisting that her daughter sacrifice her powers of reason on the altar of matrimony, this mother chips away at what the novel represents as the very foundation of religious faith. Without exercising judgment, young girls are as likely to choose terrible husbands as they are to choose the wrong religion. Although Mary's father is also to blame for coronet-hunting, Recantation argues that the duty of educating and protecting young women falls squarely on the mother's shoulders--and that bad mothering leaves girls open to the blandishments associated with Italians and Roman Catholicism, in no particular order.

Italians, it turns out, are sexy; the problem is that Englishmen are, well, not. Sex is very much to the forefront in Mary's experience of the Cotillion, in which innocent young ladies find themselves partnered by men of possibly "a thousand vices" who take the opportunity to "clasp the youthful form" of their female prey (23). Mary's melodramatic recollections cast Italian high society as an erotic meat market, in which far more domestic Englishwomen are stripped of their morals and served up to male gourmands. By comparison, Englishmen, embodied by Mary's would-be suitor Harcourt, are characterized by "coldness" and "haughty spirit" (8); even Harcourt concedes that he is "cold and despised," unlike the "bright and sparkling" Italians (46). The chill of English weather translates into a different kind of bodily chill, apparently calculated to repel rather than attract, while the warmth of Italy produces sexual heat to go along with it. In other words, it takes proper religious discipline for a young woman exposed to Italian heat to understand the lasting value of English cold. Mary, as it turns out, fails to grasp that her new husband's romantic ardor--which, tellingly, produces no children--will be transient, eventually ending in open adultery; Harcourt, by contrast, will acquire a second and more angelic Mary, who visits Italy only after she has been safely married, and, of course, has a child to reward her for her Protestant virtues. Apparently, Anglo-Italian relationships literally lack a future.

But national differences are not the only problem. Like most nineteenth-century religious fictions of all denominational stripes, Recantation denounces interfaith courtships and/or marriages. Mary exchanges Protestantism for Catholicism using terms familiar to readers of anti-Catholic texts: "'Nay, dear Mamma, it is but a difference in outward forms; the leading principles of both religions are alike'" (51). This tolerationist position, which insists on a Christian "essence" that transcends "formal" peculiarities, is a stereotypically liberal distinction with which anti-Catholic writers have little truck: as Mary later discovers, with considerable horror, Catholic belief cannot be detached from its enactment in Catholic ritual, and, indeed, Catholics who manage to perform their rituals without belief (like her husband and his more radical relatives) are not liberal Catholics or Protestants, but simply unbelievers, full stop.* Recantation's attempt to warn innocent English maidens off overheated Italian men thus recurs in its critique of such beliefs in a universal Christianity: not only does national character mandate against Anglo-Italian romance, but so too does religious character. As far as the novel is concerned, this belief in Christian universals can only derive from a fatal lack of attention to Scriptural truths; significantly, Mary does not expose herself firsthand to Catholic texts, but converts purely on the basis of oral instruction, something that startles even a priest she meets later. That is, she relinquishes her right of private judgment twice. It is only near the end of the novel, when the narrative sudden pops into fullblown prooftexting (justifying its existence, that is, by turning into an anti-conversion manual),that Mary, in an accidental variant on the sortes Sanctorum, finds the key to Protestant belief in the Scriptures. Too late, though, to do much of anything except die well.

*--Kirstie Blair has explored the problem of how form was thought to structure religious expression and, therefore, belief in Form & Faith in Victorian Poetry & Religion (OUP, 2012).

February 12, 2013

The first copyedited version of Book Two has landed on my doorstep arrived in my inbox.

It...still doesn't have an official subtitle, but I haven't yet heard objections to the one I proposed.

In any event, since I'm about to spend many hours in transit, thanks to this weekend's trip to College Station, TX, I suppose I'll have ample time to start working on it. We'll see what unfortunate typos I managed to miss when I submitted the manuscript.

(The official birthdate is around the end of this year, in case you're wondering.)